Eight years ago, Sun Yuchen said on stage: "My standard for measuring a person is how much money they make."

This is not just a phrase, but more like a footnote to his later life trajectory.

Since becoming the legal representative of "Pei Wo App" in 2014, to this year acquiring SRM Entertainment, a U.S. listed company through a reverse merger with a $100 million investment, successfully taking Tron (波场) public on NASDAQ, 35-year-old Sun Yuchen has already become the head of a publicly traded company.
He also holds seven or eight other large and small enterprises and projects. Honestly, the scale of his business empire has reached a level that’s hard to imagine.

Tron is Sun Yuchen’s most important move in the crypto world.
In 2013, he accumulated his first fortune and network within Ripple’s China team.
After turning 27 in 2017, he left his previous social app, teamed up with several Peking University classmates, and with backing from major capital players, started his entrepreneurial journey with Tron.
During the ICO period, he raised $400 million in one go, but soon faced policy crackdowns on "9.4," the team disbanded, partners fled, and he openly admitted, "The first three years were almost all wasted."

The real turning point came in April 2019.
Tether decided to issue the USDT TRC-20 version on the Tron network, a move that almost laid the foundation for today’s 99% of Tron’s market value.
Currently, a significant portion of USDT on-chain transfers worldwide are supported by Tron.
According to the latest on-chain data, USDT transfer volume and gas consumption on Tron account for over 98% of the total public chain activity.
Users typically pay between $0.3 and $8 in transaction fees for each USDT transfer.
Tron’s daily on-chain revenue has exceeded $2.1 million, with an annualized income of $770 million, most of which comes from high-frequency USDT transfer fees.
As of now, Tron’s total market cap is around $33 billion, ranking among the top mainstream public chains globally.

Besides the public chain, Sun Yuchen has also heavily invested in trading platforms.
In June 2022, he co-acquired Poloniex with multiple investment institutions, rebranding it as "Tron Trading Platform."
In October of the same year, he bought a $1 billion stake in Huobi, becoming the actual leader of this longstanding exchange.
Today, Huobi remains in the top 10 trading platforms worldwide, with a daily trading volume reaching $2.4 billion.

In the stablecoin sector, Sun Yuchen has built a complete system.
USDD is a decentralized stablecoin he personally led the launch of, issued and managed by the Tron DAO Reserve, with him directly controlling the most critical assets in the collateral pool.
TUSD, while not officially under his name, has on-chain evidence strongly indicating his shadow ownership.
In early 2025, he even personally invested over $400 million to stabilize TUSD.
As for WBTC, although not directly controlled by him, the Tron DAO Reserve holds large amounts of Bitcoin long-term.
To collateralize on-chain, the team converts some BTC into WBTC across chains to support USDD’s stable operation.
According to the latest data, WBTC’s market cap has reached $9.74 billion.

In summer 2018, Sun Yuchen spent $140 million to buy BitTorrent, a once-popular file-sharing tool that now seems somewhat "out of date."
His real plan was to blockchain-ize the entire BitTorrent protocol.
Later, he launched the BTT token, allowing users to pay BTT for faster downloads, while uploaders could earn BTT through seeding.
Although it’s still far from its all-time high, its performance in today’s market environment isn’t bad.

As an avid art collector, Sun Yuchen owns genuine works by Picasso, Andy Warhol, and other masters, and even paid $6.2 million for a "banana."
In 2021, he officially established the APENFT Foundation in Singapore, aiming to connect traditional art with the NFT world.
The APENFT Marketplace uses both Ethereum and Tron as underlying technologies, leveraging Tron’s community traffic and Sun Yuchen’s popularity to attract many creators and users.
Currently, the market cap of the APENFT Marketplace token is about $310 million.

If his business empire is his first game, then his network with the U.S. is his second.
Around 2020, due to Tron being widely used for black market fund flows, the FBI and Department of Justice in the U.S. launched investigations against him.
In 2023, the SEC officially filed a lawsuit against him.
To protect his freedom, he obtained diplomatic status in Grenada and Liberia.

But the real opportunity came in 2024.
Sun Yuchen had long believed that Trump would bring positive influence to the crypto industry.
The Trump family publicly backed the crypto sector, and from late last year to this year, Sun Yuchen invested a total of $75 million, becoming the "biggest supporter" of the World Liberty Financial project, and was appointed as a core advisor by the Trump family.
He even acquired the largest amount of Trump coins among all holders.
It’s said that Trump only attended a dinner for half an hour, and the second half turned into a solo show for Sun Yuchen.

In an interview, Sun Yuchen said, "I am the bridge between the crypto industry and the President, and to some extent, I might also be the bridge for future U.S.-China communication."
Compared to CZ, who paid a $4.4 billion fine to enter the U.S. for freedom, Sun Yuchen’s cost is minimal.
Now he has returned to the U.S., visited multiple locations and companies, and frequently tweets to show his support for Trump.

In less than ten years, Sun Yuchen has shaped his crypto business landscape into a complete system spanning public chains, trading platforms, stablecoins, NFTs, cross-chain, and international politics.
Based on available data, the core assets he holds have a market value exceeding $43 billion.
This time, going public via a shell company is just another move in his larger strategic game.